Our Post-Exam Review of the October 2015 CII R06 Exam

Now the CII have released the exam paper from their October R06 exam, it’s time to see how we did in our pre-exam analysis. You’ll want to read on if you’re planning to sit the CII R06 exam in the near future.

Case Study 1

Case study 1 focused on Kate, a divorced mum of two children. Her goals were to:

Provide adequate financial protection until her children finish university.

Arrange for the transfer of her ex-husband’s pension benefits.

Purchase a buy-to-let property.

Ensure she has an adequate income throughout her lifetime.

The exam followed a familiar format with the first question on fact finding. Fourteen marks were on offer to state the additional information needed to advise Kate on the first and fourth aim as set out above. In our analysis, we always start each aim with the fact-finding question – we know it’s going to come up, we just don’t know for which aim so we cover them all so the student is fully prepared.

The recommend and justify question was there too, although this time students had to recommend just one protection policy to cover both death and serious illness. This is a slight change from previous questions – often they separate out death and serious illness and want a product for each. In our analysis, we gave full details of the separate policies needed to cover death, illness and serious illness. All the student needed to do was add CIC to the life cover (which was given as an option) and use the same detail such as sum assured, indexation etc with the same justifications to get the marks on offer.

What followed was a bit of a mixed bag – most expected, some not. State benefits for example were there and the effect of divorce on wills and LPAs both of which we had covered, but we didn’t see the buy-to-let mortgage question coming, and we didn’t expect an IHT question for Kate either, however we did cover it for the second case study so students could easily have used the information provided for making gifts and funding using life assurance and used it to answer the question in case study 1.

Case Study 2

So onto the next case study – this one focused on Jackie and Donald, both in their 50s with two independent children and four grandchildren.

Their goals were given as to:

Ensure they have sufficient income in retirement

Improve their tax efficiency

Preserve the value of their estate for their children

Invest in a socially responsible manner

The first question was on fact-finding again – this time to cover aim 1 above, and again we had this fully covered.

Students also had to provide seven pros and seven cons of using flexi-access drawdown rather than using an annuity. This was also fully expected and the information was covered using a table format for easy revision and replication in the exam.

The next couple of questions were on their second aim – students were asked to comment briefly on the suitability of their investments and recommend and justify how the tax efficiency of their investments could be improved. All of this was expected so fully covered.

There’s always a review question in R06 and often it’s asked in connection with the second case study – for this exam students had to identify seven issues relating to Donald retiring and entering into a FAD arrangement that should be discussed at the next annual review meeting. Our analysis always covers a review question and the answers just need to be adapted to ensure it’s relevant to the actual question being asked.

In summary, the October R06 paper was a fair one and we believe our analysis covered the main points in sufficient detail for students to have achieved a pass.

Grab the resources you need!

If you’re studying for your CII R06 exam, and you’re wanting to walk into the exam with an air of confidence, grab our free taster analysis to try out one of Brand Financial Training’s resources for yourself. Click the link to download the R06 case study analysis taster now!

Over to You…

If you’re planning on sitting R06 in January, what areas do you think will pose the greatest challenge for you?

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